Are links without anchor text bad for seo

Question

We where redesigning our website and we noticed certain elements having this structure :
<div class="Item">
  <div class="Text">
    <span class="Name">Name of Profile</span>
    <span class="City">City</span>
  </div>
  <div class="Link">
    <a href="http://example.com/"></a>
  </div>
</div>

My question is if an empty anchor text is bad for SEO and Google. How do they handle this kind of link currently?